By Norman and Velma Hill
Fact: The loose confederation of extremists that fall under the Tea Party banner has pushed the Republican Party further to the right than ever. Tea Partiers argue that government does not solve problems, but rather causes them. They call for drastically reducing the size of government, especially the footprint of Washington, and expanding the purview of the marketplace.
We challenge this Tea Party–Republican premise.
Clarification: The issue is not government’s effectiveness or size. What is crucial, and often forgotten, is government’s role and to whose needs it should respond. The federal government has been an effectively positive force in so many ways that it seems absurd to name just a few; but this increasingly ahistorical environment may require us to do just that.
In the eighteenth century, a strong central government established the
U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Post Office. In the next century, Washington subsidized canal and railroad construction, making a national economy possible. Government, big government if you will, established land grant colleges and the National Weather Service. And, by no mean feat, it abolished slavery.
In the twentieth century, the federal government created food and drug inspection systems. It has funded important medical research. Washington adopted conservation measures to protect against environmental pollution. The universally admired GI Bill made it possible for World War II veterans to obtain college educations, obtain low-cost mortgages, and acquire loans for starting businesses.
Especially significant for us, as civil rights and trade union activists for over 50 years, has been the vastly expanded federal role since 1900 in helping the less powerful and less wealthy: the lower middle-class, workers, the poor, women, and minorities. Legislation has defended workers’ right to unionize, established a minimum wage, barred employment discrimination by race and gender, and has provided work for the unemployed during hard times. It has been government, not unbridled private enterprise, that has enhanced the well being of seniors through Social Security, the sole source of income for many of the elderly, and improved the health and life expectancy of seniors and the poor through Medicare and Medicaid.
President Barack Obama’s recent Affordable Health Care Act, referred to as ObamaCare, extended health insurance to 30 million limited income non-seniors; and of course, congressional legislation and federal court decisions continue to eliminate the legal foundation for racial segregation and discrimination.
Therefore, it is ridiculous for Republicans to claim the national government can do virtually no good and therefore should be downsized. In fact, Republicans’ chief concern is not shrinking federal power. They actually want to expand and extend government’s reach into the most intimate corners of our lives, denying contraception and abortion rights to women and dictating who can marry whom. Republicans are also not against government intervention in the form of aggressively providing tax breaks and subsidies for favored business enterprises.
What about our massive military establishment? Shrink it? On the contrary- Republicans want to enlarge it, even against its will.
What Republicans apparently want is to bless the powerful with more power and curse the less powerful with even less power that had been bestowed upon them through the federal government. Gov. Mitt Romney, now the head of his party as he presses his quest to capture the White House, opposes minimum wage increases. Romney’s party supports privatization of public services, which often leads to inferior services and always to lower wages. His party, not surprisingly, supports states pushing for union-busting right-to-work (for less) laws. Romney’s party even wants to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates that federal subcontractors pay no less than locally prevailing wages.
November’s election is about for whom the federal government will work. The Democrats historically, and President Obama today, have backed the interests of the lower middle-class, workers, minorities, and women. Republicans, and particularly today’s Republicans, favor the well off. Romney’s now infamous “47 percent” address to rich campaign contributors showed, in both word and tone, his contempt for ordinary Americans, whom he apparently views as moochers and deadbeats.
Romney must be resoundingly defeated and President Obama reelected. It is the responsibility of the labor and civil rights movements to maximize that vote in order to enhance the prospects for us all of a more fair, fruitful and promising future.
